Internet-based and phone-based real time communication sessions are popular ways to collaborate, and are used for everything from business meetings to customer service and technical support. These sessions may also be called synchronous collaboration sessions, and they have the advantage of allowing groups of people to have a meeting without having to be physically in the same room.
More recently, asynchronous collaboration systems have become popular. These systems allow users to post messages, data, files and the like to a central location that is accessible by other authorized users. Other users can connect to the central location at any time to view messages and retrieve data and files that have been posted there. This has the advantage of not requiring all users to be available at the same time to exchange messages.
In some cases it is desirable for a group of people to use both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration sessions to facilitate a project. In such cases, associating synchronous and asynchronous sessions would provide both functional and efficiency benefits to the users.